Elizabeth, New Jersey

Elizabeth, New Jersey, matters in the novel both as a remembered setting in Bess Roth’s childhood and as the destination Philip Roth invents when he imagines running away. For Bess, it recalls growing up as a Jewish girl in a town dominated by Irish working-class politics and parish life. For Philip, it becomes a place where he might shed his identity and find anonymous work in a pretzel factory. The town’s significance lies in this reversal: a setting associated with his mother’s constrained youth becomes, in his frightened imagination, a possible refuge.

Setting and Bess Roth’s childhood

Elizabeth was an industrial port about a quarter the size of Newark. Bess grew up in a flat above her father’s grocery store, within a civic and social world shaped by Irish working-class politicians and closely knit Catholic parishes organized around the town’s many churches. The account does not describe a single decisive incident of hostility against her. Rather, it emphasizes the narrowness of the position she occupied: the narrator had never heard her say she had been pointedly mistreated, but her later confidence emerged only after she married and moved to Newark’s newer Jewish neighborhood.

That change of setting made room for a public life that Elizabeth had not offered her in the same way. In Newark, Bess became a Parent-Teacher Association grade mother, then a vice president responsible for establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and eventually the association’s president. She attended a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis and proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday, January 30; most Newark schools accepted the proposal. By 1939, she was in her second successful year as a community leader and supported a social studies teacher’s effort to bring visual education into Chancellor Avenue School’s classrooms. Her achievements give substance to the contrast with Elizabeth: moving away from her childhood neighborhood had enabled her to build status, relationships, and influence.

The threatened return to outsider status

That contrast resurfaced when Herman Roth was offered a promotion at the Newark office of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, conditional on his family living in Union. The position promised a substantial improvement in a household still shaped by the Great Depression: Herman might earn seventy-five dollars a week, with the prospect of eventually earning a hundred, and affordable houses in Union could make home ownership possible. For him, buying a house represented the fulfillment of a long-held ambition to become a homeowner after growing up poor in a Newark tenement.

The family’s visit to Union brought the cost of that opportunity into view. Union, like Hillside, was a working-class town where the Roths expected to be among very few Jews. Bess appeared enthusiastic about the houses, but the narrator understood that she feared returning to the social position she had known in Elizabeth. She imagined herself again as the Jewish woman on a predominantly non-Jewish street, while Sandy Roth and Philip would be the Jewish children in their school. From her perspective, the move risked undoing the standing she had acquired on Summit Avenue and forcing her sons to experience the kind of neighborhood isolation she associated with her upbringing.

Elizabeth therefore serves as more than a point of origin in Bess’s biography. It is the remembered measure against which she judges the promise of home ownership in Union. The proposed move offered economic and material security, but it also appeared to threaten the family’s social belonging. Bess’s response connects two different forms of security: a house and a mortgage on one side, and the confidence of living within a community where she had become an established participant on the other.

Philip’s imagined escape

Much later, Elizabeth enters Philip’s thoughts in a different register. While considering a hearing device, he imagines that wearing it could leave him deaf and unable to speak, trapped in Elizabeth working at the New Jersey Pretzel Factory. What begins as an anxious possibility becomes an escape plan. Under the pressure of events outside the household, he imagines leaving that night, going to Elizabeth, and presenting himself as a deaf-mute so that no one would recognize or question him. The plan is not an actual departure: it is a child’s attempt to invent a life beyond the immediate dangers and responsibilities he feels closing around him.

The factory gives the fantasy practical detail. Philip remembers an article in the Sunday Call about its owner, Mr. Kuenze, who maintained that a worker could learn pretzel-making overnight. The article also described the disagreement over whether salt belonged on the pretzel’s exterior: Mr. Kuenze considered outside salt unnecessary except to satisfy customers and claimed that he alone among the state’s pretzel makers put salt in the dough. The factory reportedly employed one hundred people, including deaf-mutes and boys and girls who worked after school. These particulars let Philip picture a route into work and disguise rather than merely wishing to vanish.

He also recalls which bus went past the factory: it was the bus he and Earl Axman had taken on an earlier trip to Elizabeth. In his new plan, he prepares a note to Mr. Kuenze, claiming to be deaf, mute, and an orphan, and signs it with the name Seldon Wishnow. Elizabeth thus becomes the setting for a rehearsed transformation. Philip imagines replacing his family identity with a fabricated one, even borrowing Seldon’s name, as if a place and a written account of himself could make him unknown.

A place of refuge and recurrence

Philip’s escape scheme grows into a longer plan: to save his factory wages for a one-way train ticket to Omaha and a place at Boys Town, where Father Flanagan took in boys from the street. He imagines leaving Elizabeth behind as the first stage of an entirely new life, one in which he would not have to explain his identity or remain responsible for the loss and suffering he associates with events at home. Neither the imagined job nor the journey establishes that he reaches Elizabeth; both belong to a plan formed under pressure.

The town’s two appearances consequently illuminate different kinds of vulnerability. Bess remembers Elizabeth as a place where a Jewish family could feel socially peripheral, and the prospect of moving to another working-class town makes that memory newly urgent. Philip, by contrast, treats Elizabeth as a possible hiding place because he thinks he can become invisible there. The same place holds the mother’s recollection of restricted belonging and the son’s fantasy of escape from belonging altogether. Its return binds economic choices, family memory, and a child’s effort to imagine a life beyond the identity and obligations he cannot control.